Employment: Young People

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold, for initiating this important debate, which is vital to understanding what we need to do as a country to prepare our young people for their working lives.

Employers, when surveyed, say repeatedly that young people leaving full-time education—whether at 16, 18 or after a first degree—often lack employability skills and a real understanding of the world of work and how they must adapt and learn to succeed. In June, John Cridland, the director-general of the CBI, said that the quality of careers guidance is not good enough and that many young people leave school or college with little knowledge of the workplace. He warned that the Government,

“may have adopted too laissez-faire an approach”,

when they gave the right to schools to run their own careers advice. Careers information, advice and guidance—which I will shorten to IAG—are critical to inform and guide young people and their families about the opportunities for further education and work. We parents need our own information to be updated; entering the workplace is very different to how it was in our day. I shall focus principally on IAG.

Our present system is failing too many young people. Eighteen months ago, the Association of Colleges surveyed 16 year-olds. Only 7% knew that apprenticeships were a post-GCSE qualification. Less than 20% were able to name BTECs, and only 9% could name diplomas. All these are very good vocational routes into the world of employment. The BBC recently reported Joshua Robinson, an apprentice at Cisco Systems, as saying:

“Apprenticeships were never mentioned as a viable alternative to university and the problem really lies in the perception of schools”.

Yesterday, at a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, of which I am a member, we heard from some major engineering employers about their excellent apprenticeship schemes. We heard of a young man who had a clutch of GCSEs at grades A and A*, and who was absolutely clear that he wanted to do an apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce. Yet his teachers were telling him that this was the wrong route for him and that he must go to university. I suspect that they did not know that advanced engineering apprenticeships have a strong progression route right through first degrees and often into postgraduate study. I suspect that the teachers did not know that there were 11 applicants for every apprenticeship last year, with many, many more applying to organisations such as Rolls-Royce, Babcock and others. Sadly, I suspect that their aspirations for their students were to map out the same experience as their own: A-levels and a traditional academic course at university.

The employers yesterday were also clear that employability skills were an issue. Some good practice existed but not enough, and they applauded those further education colleges and universities that focused on them. They involve exactly the skills to which the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, referred. Communication skills are key but there are others, including leadership and working as part of a team, which do not seem to be taught in most schools and colleges. Employers are also often concerned about literacy and numeracy in young employees. We alone of the OECD countries allow young people to give up maths and/or English if they follow an academic route such as A-levels. While our A-level system has much to commend it, involving in-depth study of subjects, it is possible to leave behind one of the two core subjects that every employee will need in the 21st century.

With the raising of the participation age in compulsory education to 18 by 2015, does the Minister agree that all students should continue with both maths and English, whether pure or applied, or as literacy and numeracy, until they are 18? The international baccalaureate insists that students continue with English and maths, and there are real benefits that young people often do not realise that they need until later in their life at college or university, or when they start work. It also allows pupils to utilise their broad education by bringing creative solutions in from other disciplines to their future jobs and apprenticeships.

For those young people who follow vocational routes, there is a focus on continuing with literacy and numeracy, and I am sure that this is right. However, I suspect we need new courses that are particularly relevant for the industry that they are going into, such as English for engineers or statistics for humanities students, that will give them the skills they need. The key message to students must be that the lower your skills level, the more chance there is that you will be out of work. Recent youth unemployment statistics show that a quarter are without five good GCSEs, 14% have good GCSEs but no further qualifications, and 8% have a degree. That could not be clearer: the higher your qualification, the less likely it is that you will be unemployed.

For many young people, the best route into work is through an apprenticeship. This Government have created over 1.2 million new apprentices, and we need more employers to come on board and develop apprenticeships. There are some excellent examples of employers working in schools with both pupils and teachers, and it is evident that where it happens, everyone benefits. I believe that this should start in primary school, and I am grateful to the Government for starting IAG at 13, but business link days for 10 and 11 year-olds give children the chance to design things, to create marketing ideas and to test out experiments which can fire their imaginations and move them away from the all too common aspiration of being a footballer or, even worse, a footballer’s wife. It is also important to ensure that pupils follow the right courses at the right levels. The engineering employers we spoke to yesterday all commented that the lower level maths GCSE exam at grade C does not provide a starting point for engineering apprentices at 16, so pupils who want to go into engineering, and their teachers, should push to do the higher level exam as a minimum.

We need to see if the new arrangements for careers advice in schools are working, and I suspect that this will be a common theme of the debate. Many concerns were raised in your Lordships’ House during the passage of the Education Act 2011, not least the move away from face-to-face advice for most young people. Can the Minister tell us when a detailed review is planned and what the Government will do to ensure that young people get access to information? That is because we are still hearing about examples of schools refusing—and I do mean refusing—to allow brochures from local FE colleges or employers offering apprenticeships into their schools. How on earth can our young people and their families come to an informed decision about progression routes if they do not know about them? What action will the Department for Education take with schools where this practice persists?

The National Careers Council report, An Aspirational Nation: Creating a culture change in careers provision, provides an excellent perspective on how we can improve IAG for our young people, and asks for the role of Ofsted when reporting on IAG in schools to be strengthened. Can I ask the Minister if he supports this specific proposal, as well as the report more widely? Careers advisers are themselves coming together for accreditation and for continuing professional development, which is to be commended. We must not hamstring them by reducing the scope of their advice because of the actions of some schools. The OECD has argued that:

“As careers diversify, career guidance is becoming both more important and more challenging. More complex careers, with more options in both work and learning, are opening up new opportunities for many people. But they are also making decisions harder as young people face a sequence of complex choices over a lifetime of learning and work”.

It is vital that we have a strategic careers service that supports young people in their early and later decisions about subjects and levels of subjects. It should ensure that they have access to information about all the options open to them, not just about progression in their current school’s sixth form. Pupils should leave school, college or university with a good, broad range of qualifications and skills that will make them not just employable, but able to achieve their aspirations and ambitions for their lives.